London riots plus deprivation = interesting
Posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2011 at 10:08am. #
Francis Fawcett contacted me with an interesting piece of work – overlaying my riots map (showing London riots from Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights, details here) with the Index of Multiple Deprivation from 2007. You can see the results above.
This index, in case you don’t know (and I didn’t) is constructed from different data which is weighted and combined together, and shows income, employment, health and disability, education, skills and training, barriers to housing and services, crime, and environment.
If you want to have a play with the map, http://goto.cridland.net/riotsmap is where you’ll find it.
I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there is an interesting, if not unexpected, correlation between “deprivation” and the unrest we’ve been seeing.
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Deprivation leads to a lack of social cohesion, which is the thing that stops most of us from going out and committing violent crime or looting, whereas we might occasionally sneak over the speed limit on a motorway, because that’s more acceptable, for example.
The third thing which would make the map even more useful would be to overlay the effect of recent government cuts to youth work – I think the Guardian had the full list published a little while ago, as that looks like it could also be extremely closely related, with the majority of cuts happening in the same exact areas, in the days and weeks before the riots kicked off.